While much attention has been devoted to analyzing how the institutional framework and entrepreneurship impact growth, how economic policy and institutional design affect entrepreneurship appears to be much less analyzed. We try to explain cross-country differences in the level of entrepreneurship by differences in economic policy and institutional design. Specifically, we use the measures of economic freedom to ask which elements of economic policy making and the institutional framework that are responsible for the supply of entrepreneurship (our data on entrepreneurship are derived from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor). The combination of these two datasets is unique in the literature. We find that the size of government is negatively correlated with entrepreneurial activity but that sound money is positively correlated with entrepreneurial activity. Other measures of economic freedom are not significantly correlated with entrepreneurship.
JEL CODE: M13, O31, O50
KEYWORDS: Economic freedom, entrepreneurship, cross-country variation.

There is general consensus that coordination and integration are needed to achieve efficient outcomes while distributed decision power and autonomous actions are essential to develop innovative responses. These dual requirements for operational optimization and ongoing business innovation capture the essence of organizational ambidexterity as the means to sustain performance over time when environmental conditions change. This paper incorporates strategic management and organization theoretical rationales in a model that combines elements of integration and experimentation in the strategy making process and thereby extends the evolving literature on the ambidextrous organization. The performance relationships of the ambidextrous integrative strategy making model are investigated on the basis of a cross-sectional sample of 185 business entities operating in different manufacturing industries. Results of structural equation analyses indicate that superior performance in the ambidextrous organizations is associated with efficiencies derived from adherence to centralized strategic planning and effectiveness generated by decentralized innovative behavior through participation and autonomous actions. The study enhances our understanding of ambidexterity as the result of combined strategy making processes that balance the needs for economic efficiency and organizational adaptability. Key words: Ambidexterity, Dispersed decision-making, Innovation, Participatory decision-making, Strategic planning

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We discuss the emergence of the theory of the firm (in the Coasian sense); survey and discuss the main currents of the theo~y of the firm, and discuss what has determined the emergence of the theory of the firm. We argue that advances in the theory of the firm have been strongly influenced by conceptual innovations in (mainstream) economics in general and by the ongoing division of labour in economics in tandem with a recognition of the importance of a number of empirical anomalies The substantive borrowing from neighbouring disciplines, such as business history, law, psychology, organizational sociology and business administration has been relatively limited and ad hoc (although some scholars, notably Williamson, have made more substantive use of these disciplines than othe~s) The fact that the theory of the firm has stayed relatively close in to the (changing) economic mainstream and that its substantive borrowing from neighbouring disciplines has been relatively limited unde~lie and explain much of the "external" critique of the theory (i.e., the critiques of sociologists, heterodox economists and management scholars).

The field of strategic entrepreneurship is a fairly recent one. Its central idea is that
opportunity-seeking and advantage-seeking—the former the central subject of the
entrepreneurship field, the latter the central subject of the strategic management field—
are processes that need to be considered jointly. The purpose of this brief chapter is to
explain the emergence of SE theory field in terms of a response to research gaps in the
neighboring fields of entrepreneurship and strategic management; describe the main
tenets of SE theory; discuss its relations to neighboring fields; and finally describe some
research gaps in extant theory, mainly focusing on the need to provide clear microfoundations
for SE theory and link it to organizational design theory.

Research on companies’ internationalization has mainly focused on firm-level and country-level factors in order to explain firms’ cross-border activities. With the exception of a limited number of studies emphasizing rivalistic behavior in oligopolistic industries, industry factors have been neglected as potential determinants of companies’ internationalization. We argue that differences across industries with regard to competition level, research intensity, tangibility of the products, and the existence of clusters should influence the impetus and opportunities to internationalize. This study examines the role of such factors using data covering the internationalization patterns of the 100 largest non-financial Norwegian companies over the period 1990 to 2000. We find that industry factors contribute significantly to explaining the internationalization of these companies, and that the effects of industry factors remain strong when firm-level characteristics are taken into account.
Key words: Internationalization, multinational companies, industry factors, Norway
JEL classification: F21, F23, L10

Israel Kirzner’s concept of entrepreneurship as alertness to profit opportunities is one of the most
influential modern interpretations of the entrepreneurial function. Shane and Venkataraman’s
(2000: 218) influential assessment defines entrepreneurship research as “the scholarly examination
of how, by whom, and with what effects opportunities to create future goods and services
are discovered, evaluated, and exploited.” As such, “the field involves the study of sources of
opportunities; the processes of discovery, evaluation, and exploitation of opportunities; and the
set of individuals who discover, evaluate, and exploit them.” Shane’s General Theory of Entrepreneurship
(2003) cites Kirzner and “Kirznerian opportunities” more than any writer other than
Joseph Schumpeter. More generally, the entrepreneurial opportunity, rather than the individual
entrepreneur, the startup company, or the new product, has become the centerpiece of the academic
study of entrepreneurship.

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In this book chapter I present a multidimensional entrepreneurial self-efficacy (ESE) scale. The scale builds on three established ESE-scales, but the reliability of it is improved compared to the original three scales as the highly discipline-specific jargon is transformed to a more neutral wording of the items. The scale has been tested in a large scale survey including 445 students from twelve different programmes at three universities in Denmark and one university in Sweden. Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) has been applied in order to investigate the multidimensionality of the items in the scale, and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) has been applied to investigate its convergent, discriminatory and nomological validity. The results demonstrate support for a multidimensional ESE-scale with high predictive validity regarding entrepreneurial behaviours and with high reliability as the items are comprehensible to respondents, regardless if they have entrepreneurial experience or not. The scale can thus be used in programme evaluations that include control groups or other type of individuals that lack entrepreneurial experience.

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Entrepreneurship has become a fast-growing subfield in management research, and is increasingly appearing in economics, finance, and even law. We survey a number of approaches to entrepreneurship in the economics and management literatures, and argue that modern research in this area need to be focused around ideas from Austrian economics and Frank Knight on entrepreneurial judgment. We critically discuss the recent opportunity discovery literature in management, and argue that it has partially misunderstood the Austrian origins of the theory, and fails to ade-quately distinguish between opportunity identification and opportunity exploitation.

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Entrepreneurship is ultimately about the arrangement of resources into productive activi-ties. Much of the entrepreneurship literature, however, has focused on the demand side of the market. While resource heterogeneity is a feature of many theories of the firm, such theories are not built on a systematic theory of capital. We show how the approach to capital developed by the Austrian school of economics provides a natural bridge between theory of entrepreneurship and the theory of the firm. We refine Austrian capital theory by defining capital heterogeneity in terms of subjectively perceived attributes, the func-tions, characteristics, and uses of capital assets. Such attributes are not given, but have to be created or discovered by means of entrepreneurial action.

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The study of entrepreneurship and the study of economic organizing lack contact. In fact,
the modern theory of the firm virtually ignores entrepreneurship, while the literature on
entrepreneurship often sees little value in the economic theory of the firm. In contrast, we
argue in this chapter that entrepreneurship theory and the theory of the firm can be
usefully integrated, and that doing so would improve both bodies of theory. Adding the
entrepreneur to the theory of the firm provides a dynamic view that the overly static
analysis of firm organizing cannot support. Moreover, adding the firm to the study of the
entrepreneur provides important clues to how we can understand entrepreneurship.

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This chapter discusses entrepreneurship in the context of the RBV. What does the RBV
have to say that the study of entrepreneurship may usefully draw on? And, conversely,
how can entrepreneurship research further the RBV? I begin by sketching the RBV. I
then discuss the relation between the RBV and entrepreneurship research, before I
characterize a new research stream that has emerged over the last decade or so in the
intersection of the RBV and entrepreneurship research, namely “strategic
entrepreneurship.”

This paper maintains that the consistent application of subjectivism helps to reconcile contemporary entrepreneurship theory with strategic management research in general, and the resource−based view in particular. The paper synthesizes theoretical insights from Austrian economics and Penrose’s (1959) resources approach, arguing that entrepreneurship is inherently subjective and firm specific. This new synthesis describes how entrepreneurship is manifested in teams, and is driven by both heterogeneity of managerial mental models and shared team experiences.

This paper responds to Kim and Mahoney’s "How Property Rights Economics Furthers the Resource-Based View: Resources, Transaction Costs and Entrepreneurial Discovery" (a comment on Foss and Foss, 2005). While we agree with many of their arguments, we argue that they fail to recognize how exactly transaction costs and property rights shape the process of entrepreneurial discovery. We provide a sketch of the mechanisms that link entrepreneurship, property rights, and transaction costs in a resource-based setting, contributing further to the attempt to take the RBV in a more dynamic direction.

Agency theory studies the impact of and remedies to asymmetrically distributed
information in principal-agent relations. Yet, it does so in a surprisingly binary
manner: It assumes the principal to be perfectly knowledgeable of some pieces of
information (such as the agent’s risk aversion), while others (such as the agent’s
true effort exerted) are considered to be perfectly private information of the agent.
Agency theory thus makes very asymmetrical assumptions about the knowledge
of principals and agents, largely neglecting the human capacity for interpersonal
sense-making. This chapter explores the implications of instilling agency theory
with a more realistic account of the human capacity to read other people’s desires,
intentions, knowledge, and beliefs—that is, to have a theory of someone else’s
mind.

A substantial literature has evolved focusing on the ownership structure of international strategic alliances (ISAs). Most of the relevant studies are theoretical in nature and concentrate on the conceptual factors that influence the choice between equity and non-equity structures. A smaller number of studies provide some empirical evidence on the importance of some of the conceptual factors. The theoretical literature highlights the potential influence of relational capital and transaction costs as determinants of ISA structure; however, there is little empirical evidence on the relative importance of these potential determinants. Moreover, there is only limited and indirect evidence bearing upon the impact of host country governance attributes on ISA ownership structure. In this study, we provide statistical evidence on the importance of potential determinants of governance mode choice for a sample of ISAs involving Danish firms. Our study documents how the determinants of governance mode choice vary in importance depending upon the "quality" of the governance infrastructure of the host country.
Key words: Relational Capital, Governance, International Strategic Alliance

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Interest in entrepreneurship education is growing over the world, especially in innovation
based economies, such as Denmark (GEM, 2010). However, we know rather little about the
outcomes of entrepreneurship education, in particular with respect to which type of course
content produces the best results (i.e. most high performing entrepreneurs) and how this
affects different types of students. There is a great variety of different views in the field of
research concerning the content and structure of entrepreneurship courses, but no
comprehensive study has yet been done in which these competing views are clearly
articulated as rivals and tested against each other. There is also a lack of programme
evaluations that use control groups and have a longitudinal design (Gorman, Hanlon & King,
1997; Karlsson & Moberg, 2011; Matlay, 2008). Those that have this setup often experience
methodological problems due to their conceptual framework (Krueger, 2009), or they have a
view of entrepreneurship that does not take into account the advancements within research
that have been made during the last decade (Sarasvathy, 2008). Thus, we clearly need to dig
deeper into this field in order to create methods and models that allow us to evaluate the
outcomes of different types of entrepreneurship courses.
In the beginning of 2011, the Danish Foundation for Entrepreneurship – Young Enterprise
initiated a research project with the aim to further our understanding of the type of impact
entrepreneurship education and different educational designs have on different types of
students. Two longitudinal surveys, one with a focus on elementary- and secondary-level
education and one with focus on tertiary-level education, will be performed and databases
with students from all levels of the Danish educational system will be created. The surveys
will use entrepreneurial self-efficacy (Mauer, Neergaard & Kirketerp, 2009) as a performance
indicator, but in order to generate robust results the development of new measurement tools is
needed. In this paper the initial phases of this project and the research design of these two
surveys will be presented. The development of a new ESE scale and the results from the pilot
surveys will also be presented.

We extend the ‘centers of excellence’ concept in the multinational corporation (MNC) literature to address the diversity and the multidimensionality of subsidiary competence and link such diversity to the host country environment. Using Rugman and Verbeke’s (1993) diamond network model of competitive advantage of nations, we hypothesize the contingencies under which heterogeneity in host environments influences subsidiary competence configuration. We test our model with data from more than 2,000 subsidiaries in seven Western European countries. Our results provide new insights on the evolution of subsidiary competence and how MNCs can overcome ‘unbalanced’ national diamonds by acquiring complementary capabilities across borders. Keywords: MNC environment, subsidiary competence configuration, industrial clusters, differentiated networks, subsidiary embeddedness.

We discuss the behaviorist and empiricist foundations of the organizational routines and
capabilities literature, specifically the extant emphasis placed on experience, repetition and
observation as the key inputs and mechanisms of behavior, learning and change in organizations.
Based on this discussion we highlight several concerns associated with specifying experience and
repetition as antecedents of routines and capabilities, namely, (1) the problem of origins and
causation, (2) the problem of extremes, (3) the problem of intentionality, (4) the problem of new
knowledge, and (5) the problem of the environment. We highlight the “poverty of stimulus”
argument and more generally discuss how internalist or rationalist, choice-based approach might
provide a more fruitful (though preliminary) foundation for extant research on organizational
routines and capabilities.

The knowledge-based view has recently been criticized for overlooking individual-level action and
interaction in favor of an over-emphasis on the firm-level capabilities. This paper seeks to respond to that
criticism by providing some individual-level explanations for a collective-level phenomenon – intraorganizational
knowledge transfer. We suggest that variations in individual ability, motivation and the use
of interaction opportunities provided by the organization explain part of the variation found in individuallevel
knowledge acquisition and use, and that this has an influence on organizational level knowledge
transfer within a firm. More specifically, we find that ability and intrinsic motivation are important drivers
of individual level knowledge acquisition and use, while extrinsic motivation has no impact. Furthermore,
the extent to which an individual uses interaction opportunities provided by the organization influences
knowledge transfer both directly and through a moderator effect with ability and person-to-person
interaction.